Hadley excuse implies their quality control might filter out the freak outliers? Not so.

The Met Office, Hadley Centre response to #DataGate implied they do quality control and that leaves the impression that they might filter out the frozen tropical islands and other freak data:

We perform automated quality checks on the ocean data and monthly updates to the land data are subjected to a computer assisted manual quality control process.

I asked John to expand on what Hadley means. He replies that the quality control they do is very minimal, obviously inadequate, and these errors definitely survive the process and get into the HadCRUT4 dataset. Bear in mind a lot of the problems begin with the national meteorological services which supply the shoddy data, but then Hadley seems pretty happy to accept these mistakes. (Hey, it’s not like Life on Earth depends on us understanding our climate. :- ) )

As far as long term trends go, the site-move-adjustments are the real problem and create an artificial warming trend. On the other hand, the frozen tropical islands tells us how competent the “Experts” really are (not a lot) and how much they care about understanding what our climate really was (not at all). That said, we don’t know what effect the […]

#DataGate: Hadley reply to first audit with foggy excuses about problems 2,000 staff didn’t find

Last week we exposed absurd errors, brutal adjustments and an almost complete lack of quality control (was there any at all?) in the key HadCRUT4 data. The IPCC’s favorite set is maintained (I’m feeling generous) by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Uni of East Anglia’s CRU in the UK.

Finally the Hadley Met Centre team have replied to Graham Lloyd regarding John McLean’s audit. They don’t confirm or discount any of his new claims specifically. But they acknowledge his previous notifications were useful in 2016, and promise “any errors will be fixed in the next update.” That’s nice to know, but begs the question of why a PhD student working from home can find mistakes that the £226 million institute with 2,100 employees could not.

They don’t mention the killer issue of the adjustments for site-moves at all — that’s the cumulative cooling of the oldest records to compensate for buildings that probably weren’t built there ’til decades later.

Otherwise this is the usual PR fog — a few outliers don’t change the trend, the world is warming, and other datasets show “similar trends“. The elephant in the kitchen is the site move adjustments which do […]

#DataGate! First ever audit of global temperature data finds freezing tropical islands, boiling towns, boats on land

What were they thinking?

The fate of the planet is at stake, but the key temperature data set used by climate models contains more than 70 different sorts of problems. Trillions of dollars have been spent because of predictions based on this data – yet even the most baby-basic quality control checks have not been done.

Thanks to Dr John McLean, we see how The IPCC demands for cash rest on freak data, empty fields, Fahrenheit temps recorded as Celsius, mistakes in longitude and latitude, brutal adjustments and even spelling errors.

Why. Why. Why wasn’t this done years ago?

So much for that facade. How can people who care about the climate be so sloppy and amateur with the data?

HadCrut4 Global Temperature, 1850 – 2018.

Absurdity everywhere in Hadley Met Centre data

There are cases of tropical islands recording a monthly average of zero degrees — this is the mean of the daily highs and lows for the month. A spot in Romania spent one whole month averaging minus 45 degrees. One site in Colombia recorded three months of over 80 degrees C. That is so incredibly hot that even the minimums there were […]

Mystery Divergence? There’s a strange gap between temperatures measured by satellites and on the surface

Right now there is a very odd divergence of satellite and surface thermometers. It started about two years ago. It is not like the El Nino of 1998, where all four rose together, and satellites recorded a higher spike than the surface records. This time around the satellites are lower. In the graph below, David Evans uses the older UAH official set, not the new “beta” version which would show UAH much closer to RSS and would make this divergence look even more stark.

According to the theory of Man-Made Global Catastrophe, the satellites, which record temperatures in the lower troposphere, should be warming faster than the surface. Where is that trend?

El Ninos slows ocean turnover, keeping a layer of warm water at the surface instead of stirring it in with the cooler water below. For some reason the thermometers near airports, carparks and cities are picking up the ocean warming better than the satellites. Hmm?

I’m wary of concluding anything at this stage. There was a big gap in 2007 which resolved in two years. This gap is longer, but may resolve soon too.

Then of course, there’s the point that even the past can change, […]

UK Met Office uses graphical tricks to hide the pause

The UK Met Office went to some effort to graph the last 160 years, from hottest calendar year to coldest.

Name the scientific reason:

1. Because the order of the calendar years is important.

The graph reveals mysterious patterns — Years ending in 3, 4, or 5 are more likely to be hotter. Years containing a six are statistically more likely to be green.

OR

2. Because climate models show a linear rise in temperatures, and no “pause”, and this graph does too. Glance at it sideways and be afraid!

The Met Office used to say one year doesn’t mean anything, only long term trends matter.

Now they graph the noise.

Thanks to Barry Woods for pointing me at this, and carefully putting the years back in their chronological order in the graph below.

See the pause? See the noise?

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Has the world started cooling? Hints from 4 of 5 global temperature sets…

I’m not keen on short term trends at all, they have a habit of flicking in and out of statistical significance with each month’s new data, or even switching from cooling to warming. But for what it’s worth, and only time will tell, perhaps the world entered the downswing of the PDO cycle in temperatures circa 2005.

If the world was entering a gently cooling phase, this is what it would look like

Syun Akasofu pointed out that there was a simple 60 year oscillation of global temperatures (about 30 years of warming, about 30 years of mild cooling) on top of a long slow rise that started more than 200 years ago. He predicted that we were at the top of one of the cycles, and were about to see the beginning of a cooler cycle. This early data suggests he may be right.

See the little red dot with the green arrow at about the 2010 mark. Dr Syun Akasofu

The cooling for the last eight years is statistically significant in 4 of the 5 major air temperature datasets. One, UAH, shows a small (statistically insignificant) rise since 2005.

And here’s the political point: how many of […]

Eight reasons the Australian heatwave is not “climate change”

Eight reasons why this current heatwave is a boring, overhyped example of weather being used for political purposes.

1. It’s the long term trends that matter — not a few weeks of hot weather

As climate scientists keep telling us (except when they have a heatwave to milk), “weather is not climate”. It’s the long term trends that matter. One short four week period is not a long term climate trend, but it is an excellent opportunity to create hype and scaremongering in the newspapers. Scientists with little scruple and low standards are making the most of this.

2. The “records” we are breaking are pitifully short

Even if this is the hottest heatwave “ever recorded”, it doesn’t mean much in the long term scheme of things. Natural climate cycles work on scales of 11 years, 60 years, 200 years, 1500 years, and 100,000 years. We have decent temperature records for many locations for only 50 years. We have a scratchy patchy thermometer record for 150 years. Any scientist raving about breaking a 50 year record as if it means something is … embarrassing. There is too much noise in this system and too little data.

3. If a few […]

Blockbuster: Anthony Watts skewers Muller, BEST, and the surface record all in one paper

It’s all up on Watts Up now.

What Anthony Watts and Evan Jones have revealed is breathtaking.

[Art thanks to: Cartoons by Josh]

This new pre-print paper by Anthony Watts accomplishes so much. Assuming that no major problems are found, the pieces of the jigsaw fit and pass the common sense test. Yes, hot air rises off concrete. There goes half the warming trend. The most accurate thermometers in the right places are not recording high trends. High estimates come from combining good records with poor ones then adjusting that up. They show Muller and BEST’s latest exaggerated claims of 1.5C are meaningless. They show that only class 1 and 2 stations (which are placed well, not next to concrete, car-parks, or air-conditioners) give reliable data and the warming trend from these stations is much lower than the warming trend from Class 3, 4 or 5 stations. It’s what we always knew — thermometers near artificial heat sources are measuring artificial warming, but it’s not the global kind. Mueller, BEST, GISS, Hadley and all the others should have removed the data from poor stations entirely. No amount of statistical chicanery can correct the artificial warming effect no […]

The BOM & CSIRO report: It’s what they don’t say that matters

Ken Stewart has scanned the trend maps at BOM (Bureau of Meteorology), and his point is spot on. As soon as I saw the neat joint six page advertising pamphlet for the climate-theory-backed-by-bankers, I wondered what happened to the first 60 years of last century, and Ken found it. Did the BOM forget they have hundreds of data points from back then? Did they forget to use their own Website, where you can pick-a-trend, any-trend, and choose the one with err…more convenient results? Or is it the case that their collective mission is not necessarily to provide Australians with the most complete and appropriate information available, but with what the bureaucracy needs them to know? And what they need them to know, apparently, is the carefully censored version of the truth that will keep government ministers happy (Let us tax them more!), keep department heads smiling (Let the climate cash cow continue!), and last, but not least, help staff feel good (We’re sure we’re helping the environment!).

Why censor half their own data?

The trend map page works exquisitely well (I am happy to praise the BOM Web site team). Compare these two trend maps:

Australian Rainfall Trends 1960-2009

[…]

Shock: Phil Jones says the obvious. BBC asks real questions.

Here’s the short version of that BBC interview. (Wow? Was it really the BBC?) This major re-framing of the story and admission of facts are part of the ClimateGate Virus epidemic. Journalists are starting to ask better questions, and researchers are starting to give better answers. OK, it’s not exactly a grilling, but neither is Roger Harrabin allowing the UN to promote its scare campaign without a few seriously-pointed questions. This represents almost as big a turnaround for Harrabin as for Jones (which I’ll expand on below). Only two years ago, he claimed skeptics were funded to spread uncertainty, and likened them to tobacco industry lobbyists. How must he feel to suddenly discover they actually had a case worth considering?

Cutting to the chase: paraphrasing Phil Jones

Stripped of the extras, Jones’ answers boil down to the following (I’ve added a few things he didn’t say [in square brackets], and skipped some questions ):

A) This recent warming trend was no different from others we have measured. The world warmed at the same rate in 1860-1880, 1919-1940, and 1975-1998. [Kinda cyclical really, every 55-60 years or so, we start another round.]

Hadley […]